Nut Growing in Vermont

By Zenas H. Ellis, Fair Haven

In all my life of over seventy years I have never seen a time like the present. We have passed through the coldest winter and the dryest summer ever known.

I raise on my place in old Vermont every kind of tree that will grow there, and try many that will not, or only with more or less protection. I have apples, pears, plums, cherries, peaches and figs, with berries of all kinds. I have nut trees of many different varieties, hickories, black and English walnuts, filberts, hazel-filberts, pecans, almonds and butternuts.

Which have stood the cold and drought the best? Strange as it may seem, my nut trees have stood the extreme temperatures the best. My hardiest apples like the Wealthy, Yellow Transparent, Wolf River, and Pewaukee have gone down to their death, or so near thereto that I never expect to see any fruit from them again. Whereas, on the other hand, my hickories, black walnuts, butternuts and hazel-filberts have not even lost a leaf. Wonderful to relate and almost unbelievable my large pecan tree, over forty feet in height, and a foot in diameter, is as hale and hearty as ever.

August 15th last I picked and cracked some of my improved butternuts and hazel-filberts, and found the kernels large, full grown and normal in every way. Whereas I have not an apple or pear fit to eat, no, not even a berry either.

I set out my butternut years ago in the position of honor in front of my house, and it has merited it ever since. The kernels came out in halves and often times whole. I have given away many of the nuts for planting, even as far away as Kew Gardens, England. Money could not buy the parent tree. I would not exchange it for the best cattle ranch in Colorado, the best wheat farm in Kansas, or the best cotton plantation in both the Carolinas. It is self-sustaining, does not require any subsidy from Uncle Sam, or any twenty-five thousand dollars a year official to regulate it. It is better than any dollar nowadays, always worth 100 per cent in gold instead of 61 cents, as is our government kind. The reason is, God rules it, instead of a mere man with any combination of the alphabet you can make.

It is the same with my improved hazel-filberts which grow tall and rank and bend down to the ground with their branches heavily laden with large, well-filled nuts.

My Thomas black walnuts are doing well, as also my Sier's hybrid hickories; both are perfectly hardy but not bearing this year as it is the off year for them. The butternut and hazel-filberts have never an off year but, like the "brook," go on forever. My English walnuts with some protection passed the winter in perfect safety. But the almonds, though protected as well, fared very poorly, showing that they are not near so hardy as the former.

The other kinds of nut trees that I have mentioned, even to the pecan, withstood the rigors of the winter with no protection whatever.

My true filberts fared rather poorly but are coming up lustily from below the snow line and will, I think, be as good as ever if the past winter does not repeat itself.

What does this all mean? It means that we should plant more nut trees instead of so many fruit trees, especially the apple, which has proven more liable to cold injury than even the pear, if we would have any of the delectable valuable products of the tree kind. Why, just think of it, a few nut trees planted around every home in the country would do more to relieve the present depression than all the other agencies and remedies put together. Frost does not impair their fruit. Nuts will keep through the year or longer. Insects do not injure them as they do the soft, unprotected fruits. Squirrels may take their toll but they are far easier to destroy than a bug. To hunt them is grand sport for young people, whereas to chase a bug is no fun at all.

The workman, the professional man, the merchant, should especially raise them as they would take no time from their business. Their children would think it no work at all to gather them, that is if they were like the children of my youth who looked forward to gathering nuts as one of the pleasantest pastimes of the year.

If all our city parks, public squares, playgrounds, roadsides, waste places and other like areas were planted with them, all children even to the poorest could have a sufficiency of the healthiest food that would build up their bodies into strong healthy adults who could go out into the country and build it up again as it was years ago, instead of the vast, desolate region it is now.

What makes children so puny and so unwilling to do any real work today? It is because emigration from nut-eating countries being shut off, and our native nut trees cut down or uncared for, there is nothing to keep up the supply of the best food for the body today. The remedy is to raise more nuts so the children and adults as well can again be fed on the most valuable, healthy and strength-giving food God ever made.

Then, too, crime would be greatly reduced, especially of the juvenile kind. The spare time of our youth would be taken up for about three months in a year with a clean, pure, pleasant, agreeable occupation instead of searching for mischief and quasi-vicious adventures. Have no juvenile crime and the adult crime is reduced to a minimum, or obliterated entirely.

God started man on a nut eating diet and kept him thereon for centuries. As long as he stuck to it he was all right. We do not hear much about that era, for happy is the nation that has no history. Then he had no diseases to speak of except extreme old age, no wars and hardly any troubles. But when, in the Garden of Eden, the Devil tempted him to switch off onto some other diet, he has been wrong ever since. So then, let us return to our old diet as far as possible and have something of an Eden again about us today.

Perhaps you people of Michigan would like to know what my town of Fair Haven is. It gave you James Witherell who, while congressman from Vermont, resigned to accept the supreme judgeship of the great territory of Michigan. In the war of 1812 he had command of the troops thereof and, when ordered by the cowardly General Hull to surrender them to the British, absolutely refused. After that war he laid out anew the war stricken city of Detroit.

His grandson, Thomas Witherell Palmer, the son of a native born Fair Haven girl, became your United States Senator, Minister to Spain and, in 1893, President of the World Fair commission at Chicago. He gave to Detroit that large and beautiful park named after him.

So you see Henry Ford is not the whole architect of that great city, as good Vermont blood had to relay its foundations and get it well under way for that great auto magnate to make it the fourth city in the Union.